Entertainment

How Cut the Rope Made it to Windows 8 Consumer Preview Edition

Cut the Rope is one of those $0.99, ridiculously entertaining and addictive games/physics lessons on the iPad and iPhone. The app, which involves candy, a rope, a hungry green blob and your ability to both hit the floating stars and feed the blob, has been downloaded more than 60 million times. It’s big. Not Angry Birds big, but still big enough. It’s also one of the first apps to make it over to Microsoft's brand-new Windows 8 Consumer Preview. But how did it get there?

Cut the Rope is just one of the apps available (free for now) in the Windows App Store for the desktop OS update that at least a million people downloaded in 24 hours. Its path to Windows 8 Metro interface may be fairly indicative how other popular apps (on other more well-established app platforms) could make the same journey.

Though developed by ZeptoLab, Cut the Rope was ported by PixelLab, a small five-person development design shop and it wasn’t originally ported for Windows 8. Robby Ingebretsen, Founder of Creative Director of Pixellab, says Microsoft played matchmaker and connected his firm with ZeptoLabs for an Internet Explorer 9 port. As a result, most of the heavy lifting, taking Cut the Rope’s C++ code and converting it to HTML 5 and JavaScript was done last year. The work to bring Cut the Rope to Windows 8 Metro was relatively trivial and took about 10 days.

From a development standpoint, Ingebretsen likes what he sees in Windows 8. He said it’s a high-quality platform without a lot of bugs and said it’s “ready to work with and has a set of features that make sense.” There are some feature tradeoffs, areas where Ingebretsen says he thinks Microsoft could have gone further — though Ingebretson did not elaborate. However, the tradeoffs Microsoft made to get this far with Windows 8 Consumer Preview’s development environment are, he believes, “understandable decisions.”

There are, actually, three Windows 8 app development flavors: HTML 5 (which is what Cut the Rope is built in), Direct X (mostly for gaming apps) and XAML (eXtensible Markup Language), which Ingebretsen said is a more sophisticated form of HTML, more akin to Microsoft’s Silverlight, though Microsoft apparently does not like to call it that.

Ingebretsen also has kind words for Windows 8, in general. When he used it on a tablet, he said, “I was really surprised how much I loved it. A lot of UI stuff really made sense to me. I think Microsoft is incredibly innovative with UI, more than Apple or Android—really pushing boundaries of what you can do in digital design."

Windows 8 Metro, for example, eschews old-school interface metaphors, so a button doesn’t have to look like a button on screen. Has Microsoft gone too far? Ingebretsen does worry that Microsoft is positioning Windows “as being a UI that’s touch first.”

“I don’t know,” he continued, “if people are willing to make Windows touch first, yet. Not sure it feels right yet.” That said, Ingebretsen does believe that with the amount of convergence on the horizon, Windows 8 Metro is “a really great bet for them.”

Have you downloaded the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and tried some of the available apps? Tell us your experiences in the comments.

Windows 8 Consumer Preview: The Good and the Bad

Start Menu

Here's what greets you every time you log into your Windows 8 machine. Yes, the tiles are customizable, though it's a little unwieldy in practice.

Sharing in Metro

Sharing is arguably Metro's most powerful feature. Although the sharing option is only populated with Mail right now, once Windows 8 apps get going, you'll see options here like Facebook, Twitter and all the rest -- in every app.

Finance Metro App

Many apps, like the native Finance app, look beautiful in Metro.

Traditional Desktop

You can still get back to the familiar desktop anytime you want in Windows 8. Note the absence of a Start button, which you get to by mousing into the lower-left corner.

Bing Maps

Bing Maps, like all Metro apps, makes use of the entire screen. Right-clicking brings up options.

Multitasking Menu

You can see which apps are running by pointing your mouse to one of the left corners and then moving it alongside. Right-clicking an app lets you stop it.

Action Menu

The side action menu slides out via the side and is the same no matter what app you're in.

Buggy Email

The consumer preview of Windows 8 still has lots of bugs in it, as evidenced by this screen shot of the email app.

Internet Explorer Tabs

Since the entire screen in Internet Explorer is dedicated to showing you the web page, right-clicking twice shows you the tabs that are open.

Messaging

Messaging ties with your People app, bringing in contacts on Windows Messenger or Facebook.

Flickr Integration

The Windows 8 Photo app has built-in integration with Flickr, but it wasn't working on our device.

SkyDrive

Your 25GB of free SkyDrive space is easily accessible via a live tile, and it integrates with the Photos app, letting you avoid sending large email attachments by uploading pics to SkyDrive.

Weather App

The Weather app also looks beautiful in Metro.

PC Settings

Through settings, you can make changes to your Windows profile, which will show up -- apps and all -- on any Windows 8 machine you log into.

Flash Player Download

Yep, you still need to download Flash to get your browsers to play many videos, like those on YouTube.

Adding Apps to Start Menu

You can customize your Start menu with specific apps, even if they're desktop-only apps like the browsers seen here.

Video Hub

The video hub doesn't just show video files -- it also promotes content as well. Whether that's a plus or a minus is up to you.

Solitaire

Solitaire was available on our Consumer Preview device via Xbox Live, though Microsoft said it couldn't guarantee it would be in the general release.

Windows 8 With a Mouse and Keyboard

Microsoft designed Windows 8 to be comfortable to use either by touch or with a mouse and keyboard. We found some functions counterintuitive, but it's still a powerful interface.

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